A Personal Reflection on the Man Who Taught Me the Meaning of True Mentorship

On Sunday, May 17, I attended a workshop at the Center for the Study of Rationality on the Givat Ram campus, held in honor of Professor Yisrael Aumann and marking twenty years since he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics.

At the close of the workshop, Aumann shared meaningful memories from his life with us, some moving to the point of tears, which he called “snapshots.” Alongside the moving memories, there were also many moments of typical Aumann humor. Referring to his approaching birthday, he smiled and demonstrated it with a sign bearing the number 96: “At 96, it no longer really matters, whichever way you turn it, it still reads 96.”

During the evening, one remarkable aspect of Professor Aumann’s character came up again and again: his ability to separate the person from that person’s opinions. Aumann is known for his firm views, yet among his close friends and students are people whose political views are very far from his own. Precisely for that reason, and especially in these polarized times, this offers an important lesson in humanity, friendship, and true mentorship.

The event was inspiring, to say the least. In that same human, open, and collegial spirit, I would like to share something of the special experience I had in his presence, as someone who is, in his own words, “my youngest academic child.” I am not sure whether this title is an honor or a source of embarrassment. There is no doubt that being Aumann’s doctoral student is an immense honor. But being his last doctoral student raises the unsettling question of whether I wore him out to such an extent that he no longer wished to take on any more students…

And this is how it happened. In 2007, I sent Professor Aumann an email with a strange idea about plea bargaining and positive feedback dynamics. I had no idea that this email would change my life. I had been studying independently the phenomenon of confessions in police interrogations and in courts, and I wrote to Professor Aumann that, in my view, the prevalence of plea bargains could be explained as a positive feedback mechanism: the more a legal system relies on plea bargains, the more the pressure to rely on them continues to grow. The idea was inspired by the work of Thomas Schelling, Aumann’s co-recipient of the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2005, on social segregation.

To my great surprise and joy, shortly afterward I was invited to meet him. In that meeting, I described my thesis, and I remember Professor Aumann leaning back and casually resting his feet on the table. I felt embarrassed, but I reminded myself that perhaps his casual demeanor was actually a positive sign.

One of the conclusions that followed from my thesis, if it was correct, was that a legal system that systematically allows the truth-finding process to be bypassed through plea bargains may, sooner or later, be left almost without trials. Aumann asked to continue speaking with me about it.

At our second meeting, I came with a diagram describing the thesis of the feedback-cycle dynamics of plea bargaining. I remember Professor Aumann striking the table enthusiastically with his palm and telling me, “You should write down the date of this idea.” He did not wait. He took a pen and wrote the date at the top of the page. That page is now framed and hanging on the wall near my desk.

Then I said to him: “Professor Aumann, just before you decide whether to accept me as your student, you should take into account that a serious indictment has been filed against me.”

I told him that my father, Moshe Zohar, had passed away in 2002 after a heroic battle with Lou Gehrig’s disease, ALS. About a year later, while I was feeding our third daughter, who was then two months old, police officers entered our home and arrested me on suspicion of having murdered my father. At the time I met Yisrael, the trial was already nearing its end, and I was under house arrest, with certain restrictions eased during the........

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